Live-Blogging the Olympic Gymnastics Men’s Team Finals

As we all know, NBC Olympics made the understandable if slightly irritating decision to broadcast the London Olympics, including Olympic gymnastics, at a substantial delay. So I can only claim to be “live-blogging” in the loosest sense, blogging along with the East Coast broadcast. I have not yet seen the results — so if you know, don’t post the results!

I should also point out that we once created a whole series of interviews of elite gymnasts reflecting on their spiritual lives and athletic lives. You can find interviews with Dominique Moceanu, Amanda Borden, Samantha Peszek, Kim Anthony and Stephen McCain. You can also find an extraordinary interview with Sally Ward, who was practically on the Olympic team when she felt a spiritual calling to walk away from it all — and God had a purpose. It’s an amazing story. Check it out.

You can also find an article from my sainted father on the trials of parenting an Olympic-level gymnast. (Articles that have been at Patheos for a long time have gone through social media changes — resetting their “share counters” to zero. So, some were shared many hundreds of times on Facebook and Twitter, but it will not show.)

Right now, I’m waiting for them to show gymnastics. I’m not nearly as upset about the delayed broadcast as others. But am I the only one who finds it massively frustrating that they do not give us a schedule that tells us when each sport will be on? I understand that they want to compel us to watch the whole thing, but this is unconscionable coercion! Or something.

Timothy Dalrymple was raised in non-denominational evangelical congregations in California. The son and grandson of ministers, as a young boy he spent far too many hours each night staring at the ceiling and pondering the afterlife.

In all his work he seeks a better understanding of why people do, and do not, come to faith, and researches and teaches in religion and science, faith and reason, theology and philosophy, the origins of atheism, Christology, and the religious transformations of suffering